Romance, palace intrigue, a pretty Welsh schoolteacher, and the King of Siam, all beautifully gift-wrapped in a fabulous score by Rodgers and Hammerstein and glorious orchestrations by Robert Russell Bennett. These are but a few of the elements that account for the success of director Bartlett Sher’s production of The King And I at Lincoln Center Theater, which won the 2015 Tony Award for Best Revival Of A Musical.
Sher worked with a quartet of Tony Award-winning designers—Donald Holder (lighting), Scott Lehrer (sound), Michael Yeargan (sets), and Catherine Zuber (costumes)—the same group that all won Tony Awards for their collaboration on Lincoln Center Theater’s revival of South Pacific in 2008. Now they have given The King And I the royal treatment, creating a jewel box setting filled with shades of gold, amber, amethyst, carnelian, ruby, and sapphire in both the lighting and costumes, the latter of which were awarded the 2015 Tony for Best Costume Design Of A Musical. Read about Holder's lighting design and Yeargan's scenic design.
Sounds Of Siam
“In terms of a revival, I listened to the original production to go back to the original orchestrations and didn’t try to modernize it in a musical way but find new ways to look at the piece where we are today,” says sound designer Scott Lehrer. “This is classic Rodgers and Hammerstein with classic Robert Russell Bennett orchestrations. That was the template for doing the show sonically and how to present it to the audience.” But, as Lehrer notes, “a lot has changed in the last 65 years,” since The King And I first opened on Broadway.
This show is a classic piece of American musical history, and the orchestra is very much a part of that experience, so the orchestra is the same size as the original, 28 pieces plus the conductor. One of the big differences today is that the singers are wearing wireless microphones. “Everyone who needs one wears one,” says Lehrer, “but in Act Two some of the ensemble men don’t sing so they don’t need wireless. Bart makes use of the entire depth of the theatre, so with actors way upstage, you wouldn’t hear them, which means there as many as 42 radio mics in the first act.”
One unusual item in The Beaumont is an old SIAP sound enhancement system from Holland. “This was installed to help with sound intelligence,” notes Lehrer. “They don’t use it anymore, but there are more than 100 speakers in the ceiling as an acoustic canopy, so I use those speakers for reverberation. It’s really a luxury. In a Broadway house, you couldn’t have the time or budget to add such a huge reverb system. It sounds like part of the environment.”
A Romantic Melody
With gear supplied by Masque Sound, Lehrer divided the sound system to each of the five seating areas in The Beaumont, with five identical speaker systems—front fill, main orchestra, front balcony delay, rear balcony delay, and some surround speakers as part of the reverb system specifically for the rear orchestra seats—to cover the seating in each area. The reinforcement speakers are all by d&b audiotechnik. “I am a big fan of the sound of their systems,” says Lehrer, who notes that the number of speakers for The King And I may be less than a typical Broadway rig, but the ceiling speakers add to the overall count.
“This is a very traditional Broadway musical in terms of sound,” Lehrer explains. “I think the difference is the amount of sound that you push into the audience. Today, people are used to having sound delivered to them, not too much directionality. They are used to not having to listen hard. You had to listen harder in the past to hear musicals, as orchestras and singers were basically not miked. The audience had to lean in, which created a direct connection between the audience and actors. That is lost in a lot of contemporary productions, and there is almost a sonic wall between the audience and the stage. My goal was to make this experience more like an older Broadway experience, keeping the levels lower.”
The sound system includes an Outboard Electronics Timax 2 Matrix with its tracker system. “The imaging helps the audience feel the sound is coming from a specific space,” says Lehrer. “The eight lead actors wear radar tags that emit a six gigahertz ping and track where they are on stage, with the triangulated receivers on the rails and catwalks with sight lines to the stage. The data feeds into the Timax system for sound image definition to make sure the sound appears to come from where the actors are. The source is delayed properly and referenced for each of the five speaker systems in each of the five areas and keeps changing as they move. This provides a high-tech solution to an old-fashioned issue and is one way to keep the audience thinking they are actually listening to the actors on stage.”
The romantic sweep of the show comes from the classic orchestrations, and as Lehrer notes, “The romance comes from the feeling of the music, not pushing the PA to make big sonic statements even though it’s reinforced with time tricks, delays. In the Uncle Thomas ballet and ‘Shall We Dance,’ we push the sound a bit more to make a bigger impact but keep it contained, reinforcing the emotion in the music and the actors on stage but not as much as it is a more contemporary musical. The loudest we get is 90db, but the show is fairly quiet—usually around 70db, about 10db lower than most Broadway shows today—but still louder than the original, and it doesn’t sound like you are doing that much reinforcement. We did the same thing with South Pacific, which had more done manually by the sound mixer who had hundreds of cues that are now automated.”
As the classic score and classic orchestrations fill the theatre with the music of Rodgers and Hammerstein, the fact that the orchestra is visible adds to the involvement for the audience, as they are swept into the story of The King And I and its regal jewel box of a revival.
Stay tuned for the costume design.
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